Rant of the day

Okay, call me old fashioned but is it too much to ask to have a real person check you out at the grocery store? I know every business is looking to cut costs but I don’t see the savings. By the time I attempt to scan each item (3-4 times because the little bar code doesn’t register), look up and punch in produce codes, and enlist the one real checker’s help in entering coupon codes, and show her my ID for the bottle of wine, I could have gone through the line with the human checker 3 or 4 times. Let’s think about other “service” industries where we wouldn’t appreciate this type of service. Doctor’s offices – you lie down on a belt which runs your body through a machine. It diagnoses you, gives you a shot in the arse with a mechanical arm, you receive a plastic bag with your prescription and you promptly get dumped out the door of the clinic. I can’t even imagine having surgery or visiting my gyn!

I also wouldn’t want a hair cut by a machine. I can see it now – I enter what type of hair I have, what type of cut or color I’d like and than, voila, I come out the other end with an army green crew cut. There really aren’t any “do-overs” when it comes to hair cuts.

I’ve talked with employees in the grocery stores and they aren’t happy about the situation either. Their work hours are being cut and unhappy customers are expressing their dissatisfaction with a live person, not the machine that just took their $20 and failed to give them change. Maybe managers at these grocery stores should be replaced by machine rather than the checkers? I can certainly type in my complaints and hit “send” and I bet we’d save a lot of money in the long run.